Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson This month’s Great Read is a classic by social psychologists and researchers Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson, who present a readable, direct, and often uncomfortable(!) explanation of cognitive dissonance – which is our human tendency to hold onto flawed ideas or behaviors even when all of the data suggest that … Read More
How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better, by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee This month’s Great Read is a marvelous book about your body’s proprioceptive system, which helps you map and locate your body in space. This book helped Karla McLaren reframe the aura so that the concept of boundaries could be accessible to everyone. Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee are science … Read More
And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by Gavin de Becker This month’s Great Read can help you access the genius in your fear and anxiety. Gavin de Becker is a security expert who tells us how to work with our innate intuition — our fear — so that we can detect and avoid violence. The Gift of Fear is a wonderful handbook for … Read More
How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion by Karla McLaren This month’s Great Read is a book we’re excited to share! It’s Karla McLaren’s brand new book about the gifts and skills your anxiety brings to you. Embracing Anxiety is an in-depth guide to the emotion Karla calls “your task-completion expert.” She helps you work with anxiety directly and identify the many other emotions … Read More
Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild This month’s Great Read is a deservedly famous book by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who developed the concept of emotional labor. Emotional labor refers to the ways we manage, conceal, inflate, or studiously ignore our own emotions (and the emotions of others) in the context of the workplace. Emotional labor is a crucial part of many jobs, yet … Read More
A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors, by Lance Dodes, M.D. This month’s Great Read is a groundbreaking and empathic way to view and treat addictions, not as a character flaw or a disease, but as an attempt to address emotional pain. Lance Dodes is a retired clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard who watched people repeatedly fail sobriety programs — … Read More
The Practical Guide for Discovering the Genius in Your Emotions, by Karla McLaren, M.Ed. This month’s Great Read is a workbook that can help you understand each of your 17 emotions and learn the Empathic Mindfulness practices that can help you work directly with your emotions in surprising new ways. Based on Karla McLaren’s The Language of Emotions, this workbook helps you understand the ideas behind Dynamic … Read More
A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill, by Karla McLaren, M.Ed. This month’s Great Read is an in-depth exploration of empathy — what it is, how it works, how it develops, and how you can develop your own healthy empathy. Karla McLaren grew up as a hyper-empathic person who once thought that empathy was a psychic skill (it’s not). She realized her mistake, and dove into … Read More
What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You, by Karla McLaren, M.Ed. In our Dynamic Emotional Integration® community, we often talk about how difficult it can be to develop emotional awareness and emotional skills. So many books, movies, professionals, memes, and messages tell us to treat our emotions as problems, and that’s not helpful! It’s also completely untrue. In response, we’re starting a monthly Great Reads … Read More